Barack Obama led a populist revolt into office. Now he needs to ignore the people who got him there.

It is no surprise that Barack Obama began his presidency under a microscope, and effectively without the benefit of any sort of true “honeymoon” period. The winds of change that whisked Obama into office reflected the anxiety Americans feel over the state of the union, the global economy, and the ill-conceived and overreaching foreign policy that got them into two difficult conflicts. Americans voted for change on an incredible scale – first handing the Democrats the House in the 2006 mid-term elections, then the Presidency and Senate in 2008. In the era of political strategies aimed at a 50-per-cent-plus-one majority, Obama’s victory is an even more incredible feat. Now, however, the President is beginning to reap the unintended consequences that go along with a populist mandate.

The politics of division, an ideological mantra, and unilateralist foreign policy were the hallmarks of the Bush administration and, it turns out, an easy way to rule. The current administration came in promising to be the conciliatory voice of reason, a counterbalance to eight unencumbered years of Rove and Cheney (and Limbaugh and Coulter). We heard the promise of a thoughtful and benevolent elite, setting their sights on the crises of public healthcare and the environment and a multilateral foreign policy based on cooperation and mediation. What we have seen thus far demonstrates what conservatives have known for a long time: discussion, debate, and consensus-building are difficult objectives for a ruling party at the best of times. When it occurs in the face of both the worst financial crisis in decades at home and a limping foreign policy abroad it can be downright irresponsible, ill-timed, and unproductive.

Populism is the perfect catalyst for an ineffective legislative process. The desire to remake the socio-economic fabric of the US is contributing the two-headed monster of policy analysis paralysis and wasteful government spending. While conservatives in theory advocate “smaller government,” the economic benefit to which is the diminished likelihood of waste, populists prefer to try to attack every issue in overlarge chunks. Witness Congress’ $3.6 trillion budget behemoth that has taken aim at healthcare reform, a Cap and Trade carbon emissions program, and the “redistribution of wealth” through an increase in taxes on the wealthiest 1 per cent. None of it smacks of decisive action, all of it smells like bacon sizzling in a frying pan, and perhaps predictably, it looks to dole out a lot more than perhaps President Obama had hoped.

On the foreign stage, the world is looking to the United States to wheel out that confident, arrogant, "decisive-action" stance they’ve grown accustomed to over the past eight years. In an era when the U.S. absolutely could not afford to alienate or isolate themselves from their allies, they did precisely that. Now that they are needed to act like the lone superpower they are, they cannot. At the recent G-20 summit, Obama thought he was going to a meet and greet with his European sycophants. What he got instead were some nice photo ops, and no commitments on the two largest U.S. objectives of the meeting: a commitment to fiscal stimulus (2 per cent of GDP), and troop numbers in Afghanistan.

Populism’s hook is that it needs to be completely contextualized – in this case, the world is in crisis, and in times of crisis, people put their heads down and worry about the here and now. Bush couldn’t figure out that the average Iraqi cared more about reliable electricity and some measure of personal security than the prospect of a democratic society 10 years down the road. Now Obama is frightfully close to not understanding that Americans are concerned about sinking in a quicksand of personal debt, negative-equity mortgages, and losing their jobs. A narrow focus is required for the administration: fix the financial system and absorb the bad loans and illiquid assets weighing down the banks’ balance sheets, even if it means using the bully pulpit to dictate to the banks a price at which to sell those assets.

Geithner, Paulson & Co. know that the federal budget alone cannot rescue the economy, and that the Treasury needs to add a late shift to its print shop – this is not news. However, passing a budget with nearly 9,000 earmarks and a significant increase in federal expenditures, while remaining mum on extending the bailout another $750 billion seems to be proving the conservative blogosphere correct – tax and spend Democrats can bankrupt you faster than even the most crooked Alaskan senator building a bridge to nowhere.

Obama has his mandate from the people. It’s pretty easy to give the public what they want now – a stable economy, and all of its trappings. Do Americans need to undergo wholesale social, cultural and economic change? Probably – they consume too much, earn too little, and pay too much for healthcare, but those issues are not likely to be of any relative import in the short term. They need to be bailed out of this situation now (pardon the pun), by wielding the broadsword of executive power and exercising a measure of fiscal restraint.

The administration and Congress, however, are paving the way for half-constructed, moderate solutions to complex social problems, creating conflicting federal priorities, and opening the door for massive amounts of waste. This budget just looks like an effort to ram a massive spending bill through before Obama’s accountability and visibility improvements occur in 2010, blaming the increase on repairing the damage done by the previous administration. In reality, the White House and Congress are attempting to reform American society in one fell swoop, which is something that needs to wait until next year. Move the 2010 stimulus package into the '09 budget, push out the social reforms and big picture thinking until the next term.

The President needs to flex his political muscle to get domestic interests and foreign allies on-message. Doing so can virtually guarantee a first-term canonization at the populist pulpit. Failing to display the type of savvy required to see the U.S. out of this mess will likely negate the prospect of a second.